TSkim : A tool for skimming ROOT trees

Like many HEP researchers, the members of the Fermi collaboration have chosen to store their experiment data within ROOT trees. A frequent activity of such physicists is the tuning of selection criteria which define the events of interest, thus cutting and pruning the ROOT trees so to extract all the data linked to those specific physical events. It is rather straightforward to write a ROOT script to skim a single kind of data, for example the raw measurements of Fermi LAT detector. This proves to be trickier if one wants to process also some simulated or analysis data at the same time, because each kind of data is structured with its own rules for what concerns file names and sizes, tree names, identification of events, etc. TSkim has been designed to facilitate this task. Thanks to a user-defined configuration file which says where to find the run and event identifications in the different kind of trees, TSkim is able to collect all the tree elements which match a given ROOT cut. The tool will also help when loading the shared libraries which describe the experiment data, or when pruning the tree branches. Initially a pair of PERL and ROOT scripts, TSkim is today a fully compiled C++ application, enclosing our ROOT know-how and offering a panel of features going far beyond the original Fermi requirements. In this manuscript, we present TSkim concepts and key features, including a new kind of event list. Any collaboration using ROOT IO could profit from the use of this tool.